


Difficult

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders' Era, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-14
Updated: 2006-06-14
Packaged: 2019-01-19 23:30:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12420453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: Being the other woman was killing her. It really was. Having an affair with James Potter was like being poisoned slowly.//A story exploring the perspective of the "other woman"...Lily and James. Experimental oneshot.





	Difficult

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

 

** Difficult **

**~~A/N:~~ Oneshot. Please don't forget to review on your way out! And remember, flames keep me warm. So, at the risk of being a review whore...tell me what you think. **

 

 

Being the other woman was killing her. It really was. She knew that her mother before her had cheated on her father for years—but had it really made that much difference that she’d already had a man, one that loved her through her lies and fake attempts at affection?

But having an affair with James Potter was like being poisoned slowly. She pictured her red hair fading and her eyes growing absent; she pictured herself being sucked into life through a morass of laziness and brief contentment at stolen kisses in hotel rooms.

He’d liked her for years, he’d said. Tall, dark, and silent—that was how everyone described him…she’d never known he had felt this way, she said. Their first kiss was covered in the anxiety of being caught; the corridor was one of the times when their actions had not belonged to them. For all she knew, James Potter could have lied about the passion that he claimed consumed him. He was private about his feelings, at least to her. 

This afternoon, he’d pulled up to her house on some yellow, ostentatious motorcycle, one he must have bought when Sirius had gotten his. Before he walked into her house, he brushed an invisible speck of dust from the miniscule windshield. She pretended not to be watching.

When he was ten, he shut his eyes and kissed a girl at an ice-cream stand in Diagon Alley. His fists were clenched with nerves and the girl looked at him from beneath light eyelashes, suddenly coy. The girls always were, and he’d come to find Lily was no exception—she’d been silent that day in the corridor, looking at the floor. Before her death, that section of tile would flash in front of her eyes before James himself would. 

This afternoon, he stretched leisurely before he entered her house; he preoccupied himself with looking at the scrubby ground where a bed of flowers should have been—her house looked exposed without any protective plants.

She was already lying on her bed, not caring about putting on any type of effort into James’s visits anymore. Maybe things where still exciting for him, but she smelled the freshly washed sheets below her as he kissed her forehead. Like an old man. 

In the beginning, it had been rose petals on the bed and scented candles gently wafting flowery or fruity scents into the room. They had lounged on silk sheets, and her floor had been vacuumed just that day. 

Now, her clothes hamper was overflowing and she hadn’t even picked up her magazines from the floor. The night before, she had stepped on one, ripping the pages and skewing it across the floor. 

The magic was gone.

As he moaned above her, she looked carefully at the ceiling and thought of her mother. Her poor father. And her sister Petunia, looking disdainfully down from her lofty perch on the stairs with that scrunched-up expression on her face. Her mother would go out the door in a cloud of jasmine, wearing the most flattering items in her wardrobe—those shoes that made her legs go on forever, that shirt that brought out the gray in her eyes—with some unrelated, un-plausible excuse (dinner with her second cousin, perhaps). Lily didn’t judge. Petunia did. And you could see the difference in their lives because of it.

When James stood up and pulled on his shirt, she sighed. They hadn’t even spoken one word to each other. For a second, she imagined the afternoon differently: he would sweep her up in his arms; a breathy hello as he kissed her neck, maybe. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt so much like an object. Like it was her body alone James was interested in. 

He was already down the stairs, already moving out to his motorcycle, which was more of a person to him than she was. She visualized its death in one loud crushing sound, visualized James Potter’s look of anguish. 

Her world looked gray. She wondered why her mother had put up with it.  


End file.
